Announcing Socialite end of life

History

Ever since we acquired Socialite from Realmac Software in December 2010, we have been planning on releasing a faster, more stable version 2. Months of work had gone into making Socialite 1 better. Then we shifted our focus to the development of Socialite 2. Since then, including some unsuccessful attempts, we’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars into its development and months of our time.

In June 2012 Twitter announced API changes and made it clear that traditional Twitter clients, such as Socialite, should not be developed. Some of these new rules made developing Twitter support in Socialite 2 impossible, so after much deliberations, we had decided to stop the development of Socialite 2, but to continue the support of the current version of Socialite.

Since then, keeping Socialite users in mind, we have tried to find a buyer for Socialite. A buyer that could give it a new home, invigorate it and create a new roadmap. But our efforts have been in vain. No such buyer was found, and we decided to continue supporting Socialite in its current form, mainly for its users’ sake.

Recent end-of-life of Google Reader was the last nail in the coffin of Socialite, as without it Socialite loses much of its appeal.

The announcement

The increasing amount of work that updating Socialite required, prevented us from giving proper attention to the development of our other applications and stopped us from creating new exciting applications. At the same time, declining sales and lack of a feasible roadmap made little sense to invest even more resources into Socialite.

Following these developments, we regretfully have to announce the end-of-life of Socialite application starting today. We are deeply sorry that Socialite came to this bitter end, and we understand the frustration of loyal Socialite users. We did our best to make it work, but to all things there is a beginning and an end, and this is the end of Socialite. Hopefully, it will also be a beginning of something else.

Logistics

What will change:

  • We will stop selling Socialite both on our website and on the Mac App Store
  • We will not release new versions of Socialite
  • We will not keep Socialite up-to-date with API changes of supported services, so going forward some services may stop working
  • We will not provide technical support to Socialite starting November 2013
  • Users who have purchased Socialite from our website starting June 1st 2013 are entitled to a refund. Contact us at http://support.apparentsoft.com/ and we will process your refund immediately. Unfortunately, Apple does not let us provide refunds to customers who purchased Socialite from Mac App Store.

What will stay the same:

  • The latest version will continue to be available for download from our website
  • We will continue to provide limited licensing support for existing users
  • We will provide limited technical support for existing users until the end of October 2013, to give them time to migrate to alternative solutions, like:
  • Hootsuite for power users of Facebook and Twitter
  • Tweetbot for Twitter
  • Feedly or ReadKit for RSS
  • Facebook website for Facebook
  • Flickery for Flickr

It’s been a long ride, and it has been a pleasure to have such enthusiastic users.

Jacob and Kosta Apparent Software

Socialite 1.5

We’re glad to announce Socialite 1.5 with some important changes. It’s available immediately to direct customers. It was also submitted to the Mac App Store yet the reviews there take about a month now. Use the auto-update mechanism or download directly.

Read the release notes below carefully. There are some important changes in there. There are also some under-the-hood improvements that are not visible in the notes which will help future development.

Note, the version submitted to the Mac App Store will be sandboxed, to adhere to Apple’s requirements. The direct version is not sandboxed.

  • Socialite is now a 64-bit application. Previous versions were only 32-bit. This means it’s more adapted for the future and also that it won’t run on the 32-bit Macs (first generation Intel machines).
  • Text is now sharp on the Retina display. Also updated the application icon for the larger size required for Retina display.
  • Flickr authentication update. Flickr is deprecating its old application authentication mechanism in favor of the more standard OAuth authentication. For you it means future support for Flickr. It also means that Socialite will ask you to authenticate your account again. Only once per a Flickr account.
  • Removed Digg service. The old Digg service was sold and discontinued. The new site is a completely different service. Most of you probably did’t care about Digg by now anyway.
  • Allow increasing and decreasing font size in web view (RSS articles). This is available with Ctrl–+, Ctrl–- and Ctrl–0. The commands are also available in the right-click menu or in the View menu. The zoom setting is remembered between relaunches of Socialite.
  • Updated Growl SDK to version 2.0. If you’re using Growl 2.0, you’ll now be able to forward Socialite’s notifications to Mountain Lion’s Notification Center. Hopefully there also should be less crashes related to the buggy Growl SDK in the previous version.
  • Add menu item “Reveal Database File” in the Help menu.
  • Security enhancements and minor bug fixes

Socialite 1.4.2 with Mountain Lion support and fixes

We’ve released Socialite 1.4.2 today, to direct customers only. It was also submitted to the Mac App Store but we didn’t want our direct customers to wait since the fixes are important and Apple unfortunately takes quite a lot of time to review submissions recently.

The changes in 1.4.2 are:

  • Fixed constantly spinning Facebook account when sessions expire. Facebook has changed its policy and now applications get only 60 days of access to Facebook before their access tokens expire and the user has to authenticate the application again.
  • Fixed displaying of RSS and Google Reader articles on Mountain Lion
  • Embedded content (such as YouTube videos) now shows in RSS/Google Reader articles. This was a long-standing bug.
  • Socialite is now signed with Developer ID signature for being compatible with Mountain Lion. This is only important to direct customers. This also means that on the first launch of the new version the system will ask you to grant Socialite access to keychain entries. It may ask once for each separate account you have in Socialite.
  • Fixed the incorrect drawing of rows in the sidebar when rows are expanded. Previously the unread badges could be drawn too far to the right.

Direct customers, check using the built-in update option. Or download new version directly.

Socialite 1.4.1 released

The new update of Socialite is mostly a bug fix release, taking care of a lot of crashes that happened in previous versions. It also brings full URLs to twitter status updates and brings back support of showing twitpic and yfrog images in the built-in image viewer.

The update is available both in the Mac App Store and through built-in updater (Sparkle).

If you need to download the last version that worked with 10.5 and PowerPC’s download version 1.3.9.

Release notes for Socialite 1.4.1:

  • Show full links in Twitter instead of short t.co ones
  • Restored showing of twitpic and yfrog images in the built-in image viewer for Twitter.
  • Fix font smoothing issues for some users.
  • Many very important stability fixes, including ones related to Growl notification, Facebook service and more.

Socialite 1.4.0 improves stability, memory usage and drops 10.5 support

The new version of Socialite has some usability improvements along with lots of bug fixing and performance improvements. It also drops support for Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. If you need to download the last version that worked with 10.5 and PowerPC’s download version 1.3.9.

Release notes for Socialite 1.4.0:

  • Better memory management, especially when using Socialite for a long time.
  • Always show events in favorites/starred containers.
  • Fix loading in RSS URLs with “|” in URLs.
  • If there’s an active filter (search), “Mark All as Read” will only mark read the filtered events.
  • Delay start of search (filtering) by about half a second to allow fast typing of search terms.
  • Twitter: user’s newly posted tweets are now initially unread.
  • Facebook: user’s own status updates become unread if there are new comments for them.
  • Lots of bug fixes and stability improvements
  • Updated Growl framework to version 1.3.1 SDK.

Socialite 1.3.8 brings support to Growl 1.3

Socialite 1.3.8 brings compatibility with Growl 1.3 (available from the Mac App Store only).

It also fixes an issue that some customers had which manifested itself like Google Reader and possibly other accounts weren’t saved between launches.

Last, it increases the number of unread articles that Socialite will fetch for each Google Reader feed from 100 to 1000. This is needed if your feeds generate more than 100 new articles between the times that you check the feeds.

Socialite 1.3.8 was also submitted today to the Mac App Store but as always, there’s no way to know when it’ll be released.

P.S. RIP Steve Jobs, your life is an inspiration to generations of entrepreneurs.

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